Thursday, May 19, 2016

The Wisdom of Sacred Spaces

How do we define sacred space? This article from On Being got me thinking about this question. While the article speaks
specifically of built spaces like churches, I began to wonder about the places
that exist all around us. What makes a place, especially a place in the natural
world, sacred?

We live in a world where the concept of sacred space is
misunderstood, and often simply dismissed. The idea that a place could have a
sacred, spiritual dimension is thought of as a relic of another time. The very
idea strikes hard against our Western way of thinking, with its faith in the
empirical and its search for predictable certainty. Oddly enough, this
sentiment comes not just from secular corners but from religious ones as well.

Modern religious thought, at least in the Christian
tradition that I was brought up in, tends to accept the epistemological
conclusions of a dualistic worldview without actually realizing it. It stresses
the transcendent nature of God over immanence, and leads to the conclusion that
a place can only be sacred if it has been properly set aside as such. Churches
and cathedrals might be considered sacred spaces, but they are only sacred in
the sense that they provide an escape from the outside world and remind us of
our non-material, spiritual nature. Their intent is to turn us away from the
world, not to dwell within it. To suggest that the place itself has a depth of
sacredness that is inherent in its physicality is considered pagan or worse.

The consequences of such a view are profound. Such theology
forces us to become “dis-placed”, to feel that we are not at home no matter
where we are. This distancing from the stuff of everyday life means that we
also become free to exploit the land on which we live without any further
thought. And if we can treat the land like an object to be exploited, what is
to stop us from dehumanizing its human occupants as well? Coming from a faith
tradition that centers its theology on incarnation, on the physicality of the
divine, these consequences seem especially ironic and tragic.

Still, I find myself unsatisfied with the opposite approach,
which simply says “all the earth is sacred”, and leaves it at that. I don’t
disagree with this statement, but are there certain places that hold a more
sacred dimension than others? We certainly find this in more traditional indigenous
religious thought. There are certainly sacred groves and places where the
proverbial veil is thin, these liminal spaces where the spirits walk more
visibly. What makes these places sacred?

I think that the answer can only be found by entering into a
relationship with the land that removes any notion of treating the land like an
object. The land must be assumed to have a voice and a language, and it is the
imperative of the dweller on the land to learn it. Perhaps the definition is
personal and individual, but I suspect that it best understood communally. That
is the wisdom in religious tradition in the first place: passing on knowledge
of the sacred places to preserve them for future generations. Wisdom is
ultimately connected to place because it is most clearly manifest in knowing a
certain place. Wisdom without connection to place is just disembodied
knowledge.

In my last blog, I spoke about the tendency to only equate
nature with the pristine. This is relevant here as well. To the extent that we
do find spaces in nature sacred, we generally limit this to places that we
consider impressive based on our aesthetic sensibilities. I won’t deny that the
impressive places I’ve visited, like Mt. Hood or Crater Lake, have a
transcendence to them that is apparent. It’s not hard to have a spiritual
experience in such a place. But if only these places are sacred, then we find
ourselves able to trample our own neighborhoods underfoot without much thought.

A place becomes sacred when it reveals to us, in its own
time and manner of speaking, what it truly is. This isn’t some sort of gnostic
hidden knowledge. This is the truth hidden in plain sight, the fact of the
interrelated nature of all life and the unique way that each organism
contributes to the whole. When we can learn this from a place, I think that we
can call it a sacred space. The most sacred spaces are the ones that reveal
this to us time and time again, often with different nuance each time. And
these places also show us our own interdependence, our own place in this
complex web of life. Their sacredness comes in the wisdom that they
communicate.